


bone to the ire and the marrow

by tenworms



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Shedding/Molting, like sickfic but weird because it's crabs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:29:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenworms/pseuds/tenworms
Summary: Nagomi sheds. Jessica takes care of her.
Relationships: Jessica Telephone/Nagomi McDaniel
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	bone to the ire and the marrow

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings: blood/gore/body horror, may also be triggering if you have any skin picking tendencies
> 
> crabitat was talking about the concept of molting as, like, weird body horror sickfic so!! ran away with it!!! crab anatomy is SO weird guys it's so fun
> 
> title from marrow by st vincent!

Jess is sleeping in her bed. It’s long past sunrise, 10AM, so the light coming in is bright and fresh. It catches her hair, makes her glow. She always looks smaller when she’s asleep. There’s a little crease between her forehead that never fully smooths out. She clings, too, to whatever she can— she’s got her arms wrapped around Nagomi’s claw, cheek nestled in a smooth spot between the spines. 

Nagomi can’t get back to sleep. She’s ravenous all of a sudden, itching. Restless. She’s got that feeling like she needs to run. She lays still. She can hear the blood in her ears. 

It’s time again. 

Movement feels huge and significant and impossible. If she shifts even slightly, she can feel how her joints have settled, stiff and wooden, even as her body inside wants to escape. She feels claustrophobic, suddenly. Can’t stand the feeling of Jessica clinging so tight to her arm, she needs to get _away_ , she needs to _breathe_ —

She wrenches her claw away from Jess’s grip, but it cracks, tears at the seam between skin and shell, and gives way. Blood, half red iron and half sickly grey-blue copper, seeps out and eddies down the now empty shell, pools on the mattress. It’s not meant to bleed. It never used to bleed. Her skin never used to tear, either. 

She scrambles back, clutches her claw to her chest. It’s soft, the fresh shell wet and velvety. The viscera underneath makes it bulge as she shifts. And it _hurts_. 

Jessica wakes up, opens one eye and then the other. She hasn’t noticed yet that she’s holding an empty husk. There’s a shred of skin flopped over the top of the shell right next to her face.

Nagomi falls out of bed. Cracks her other shoulder open on the way down, but better than falling on her freshly molted claw. She almost slips on blood and fluid running to the bathroom, collapsing into the bathtub. Her ankle twists unpleasantly underneath her. 

“What’s going on?” Jess calls, voice rough from sleep. 

It takes Nagomi a minute to speak. “I’m molting. You don’t have to stay,” she rasps. “Sorry. I didn’t know it was happening today.” 

Silence from outside the bathroom door. Nagomi leans her head against the edge of the tub and squeezes her eyes shut. Something in her spine cracks, something along her ribcage. 

She desperately hopes this molt is only one layer. 

She hadn’t had room to stretch in the peanut, no room to shed properly. So when she had collapsed out into the light, blinking and stumbling, there had been multiple layers of cracked skin and shell to peel off. 

She’s still defossilizing. Her body hasn’t remembered how to do it right again yet. It takes a few tries. She’ll claw through the dead skin and old chitin at her wrist and find, underneath, another layer already cloudy and ready to come off. She’s started shrinking, she thinks, under the weight.

Footsteps on the tile as she tries to catch her breath. She opens one eye, hazy with tears, and there’s Jess. She’s dwarfed in one of Nagomi’s shirts, holding something Nagomi can’t make out. She blinks to clear her eyes. 

It’s a glass of water and a chocolate bar. “You need the glucose,” says Jess. “I looked it up.” 

Nagomi starts to sit up. Something bends away from her back with all the sickening panic of a bending bone. She collapses.

“It’s only getting worse from here,” she says. Since the Crabs… since moving back to Hawai’i she’s shed by herself a few times. It’s never pleasant. She doesn’t want Jessica to see her like that.

But also the idea of shedding alone again feels like her sternum is being pried up and replaced with a knife, so she lets her claw drop to her lap and reaches out to take the water and chocolate. Jess kneels on the tile to make it easier. 

“Tell me how I can help you,” she says, brushing Nagomi’s hair off her face. Her thumb lingers on Nagomi’s cheek. 

“You don’t have to do anything,” Nagomi says, fast, then hisses through her teeth: the pain is ramping up. More things are breaking. She takes a sip of water and tries not to drop the glass. It comes away smeared in iron and copper. 

Jessica doesn’t move, just sits down properly and leans against the tub. It can’t be comfortable. But here she is. 

“Do what you have to,” says Jessica. “I’ll be here.” 

Nagomi can’t really answer that because her back is splitting apart at the spine. She’s taking shallow breaths. There’s cracks in her ribcage she needs to take care of. 

Time passes. It’s blurry. Just pain and bone snapping. Just a new self growing in. Her face is all that’s left. 

“Why are you still here?” she mumbles, through the blood and sweat. 

A pair of lips at her temple. Hands gentle and cold at her fevered cheeks. “Because I love you.”

“Okay,” she whispers. “Here I go.”

She pulls her eyestalks in and squeezes her eyes shut. Finds purchase on her jawbone and shakily pushes up. The shell digs into the raw skin on her fingertips. Her whole body feels like it’s been cut to the quick. 

Most of her face comes off easy. The skin and shell are smooth underneath. She pops her eyestalks back through the sockets. Adjusts so they look like human eyes again. 

That’s the worst of it. 

With an unsteady hand, she turns on the faucet. The blood swirls together in the water, grey-brown. The freshwater stings. Should be saltwater. 

She only had two places where the shell was two layers deep, though. Lucky this time. It could’ve been worse. Her claw is already healing up, too— touching it feels like touching an open wound rather than a raw nerve. Which is an improvement. 

Jessica leans back towards the sink and pulls out a washcloth. She doesn’t look at Nagomi when she wets it under the faucet, just glances up for a moment with hands outstretched. Waits for Nagomi to nod hesitantly. Pulls Nagomi’s chin towards her and starts sponging the blood off her brand new skin. And— it still hurts, but it’s the first pain today that’s been gentle. 

Nagomi puts her hand on Jessica’s wrist despite the pain. “Thank you,” she says quietly. 

Jessica’s gaze is darting back and forth from one eye to the other. She’s smiling, but that little crease between her eyebrows is back. There’s something unreadable in her eyes. “Here,” she says, “let’s get the rest of the blood off of you.”

**Author's Note:**

> jessica isnt wearing nagomi's shirt for gay reasons btw it's actually because she's an asshole and doesn't wanna get blood on her own clothes
> 
> thank you for reading!! comments/kudos are always appreciated :") 
> 
> i'm on tumblr at [@919](https://919.tumblr.com/)!


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